Dear Reader,Gandhiji said “be the change”. Indian politicians, it seems, have settled for changing the name.The latest addition to this long tradition comes from Praveen Khandelwal, the BJP’s Lok Sabha member from Chandni Chowk. He has written to Union Home Minister Amit Shah proposing that Delhi be rechristened Indraprastha, in order, as he put it, to restore the city’s ancient civilisational identity. The letter arrived a day after the Union Cabinet approved a proposal to rename Kerala as “Keralam”.Khandelwal went further. He proposed renaming the Old Delhi Railway Station as “Indraprastha Junction” and the Indira Gandhi International Airport as “Indraprastha Airport”. He also suggested installing statues of the Pandavas at Purana Qila to, in his words, revive the city’s ancient cultural heritage. Arguing that the name Delhi came into use only during the medieval period, he said Indraprastha—the capital of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata—represents the city’s civilisational origins.Drawing on past renaming exercises, he cited Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, and Prayagraj as precedents. He also wrote separately to Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta urging the Delhi Assembly to pass a resolution in support of the change. It was not his first attempt. He had made the same demand a few months earlier, making this his second push within a year.This is not a new idea, even for Delhi. Before Khandelwal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Delhi unit had sent a seven-point recommendation to Delhi Tourism Minister Kapil Mishra, seeking to rename the Indira Gandhi International Airport as Indraprastha International Airport and the Delhi Railway Station as Indraprastha Railway Station.In November 2025, at Purana Qila, Mishra released a song called “Ye Indraprastha hai”. This was a five-minute rendition celebrating the ancient name. A cultural organisation had started an Indraprastha Festival at the same venue in 2016.The name Indraprastha, meanwhile, has long circulated without formal endorsement. Delhi’s compressed natural gas supplier, Indraprastha Gas Ltd, uses it. There is a metro station by the same name on the Blue Line. In February 2026, two metro stations in Delhi were renamed—among them Mayur Vihar Pocket 1, which became Shri Ram Mandir Mayur Vihar.Name changes in Delhi have a pattern of their own. Roads named after rulers spanning centuries—Ashoka Road, Aurangzeb Road, Tughlak Road—encoded a certain reading of history, but in 2015, Aurangzeb Road was renamed Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Road.Renames rarely settle matters; they tend to invite fresh disputes. In December 2019, the Delhi government renamed the Pragati Maidan metro station as Supreme Court metro station. A public interest petition followed, seeking that the station’s Hindi signage be changed from “Supreme Court” to “Sarvoch Nyayalaya” in Devanagari script, on the grounds that the Central Secretariat station was rendered as “Kendriya Sachivalaya” in Hindi, and that the Supreme Court itself uses “Bharat ka Sarvoch Nyayalaya” on its official website. An exasperated Delhi Metro Rail Corporation later told the Delhi High Court it opposed the change, citing the financial burden on the public exchequer.Connaught Place was officially renamed Rajiv Chowk in 1995, in memory of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. When the idea was first mooted, local traders protested vigorously, fearing that changing the name of such a recognisable address would undermine its identity and hurt their business. Decades later, most Delhiites still call it Connaught Place, or simply CP. The metro station built beneath it adopted the new name in 2013; the place itself did not.The Mughalsarai railway junction in Uttar Pradesh, which is one of the oldest and busiest in the country, was renamed Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction in August 2018, after years of political pressure from the BJP, which has ties to the Hindu nationalist ideologue who died under disputed circumstances near the station in 1968. The township itself was renamed Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Nagar the same year. People in the region still say Mughalsarai.Renaming Bombay as Mumbai, Calcutta as Kolkata, Bangalore as Bengaluru, and Trivandrum as Thiruvananthapuram (arguments for shedding anglicised colonial legacies and restoring indigenous names) took years of political pressure and public negotiation. Even so, old usages continue in everyday speech, in legal addresses, in public memory.In my home State of Bihar, in 2024, a BJP legislator demanded that Bakhtiyarpur railway station be renamed, arguing it was named after Bakhtiyar Khilji, the Turkish military commander who destroyed the ancient Nalanda University in 1193. Union minister Giriraj Singh backed the demand. “Our government will remove all symbols of servitude in Bihar,” Singh said. But BJP’s ally, the Janata Dal (United), rejected the demand. A JD(U) spokesperson said the town was named after the Sufi saint Bakhtiyar Kaki, not the commander. Nitish Kumar, whose home constituency this is, has declined to pursue the renaming.Then came Karachi Bakery. In 2025, as India-Pakistan tensions escalated following the Pahalgam terror attack, protests erupted at bakery outlets in Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam. Demonstrators demanded the name be changed. What the protesters either did not know or chose to overlook was straightforward: the bakery was founded in 1953 in Hyderabad by Khanchand Ramnani, a Hindu Sindhi who had migrated from Karachi after Partition. It was an act of nostalgia for a lost hometown. “Karachi Bakery is a 100 per cent Indian brand,” the owners said in a public statement. “Our name is part of our history, not our nationality.”The logic the protesters employed could, if applied consistently, prove inconvenient. There is a Rawalpindi Jewellers in Noida. And what of Mysore Pak, the south Indian sweet? Or the tart, cumin-heavy Lahori Jeera? The question might sound rhetorical but tests where the renaming impulse stops, and why.Some organisations, including the Akhil Bhartiya Hindu Mahasabha, have demanded that Meerut be renamed Maya Rashtra or even Pandit Nathuram Godse Nagar. There have been calls to rename Ghaziabad and Hapur as Digvijay Nagar and Avaidyanath Nagar, respectively, after former heads of the Gorakhnath Math. Chief Minister Adityanath is the current head of the Math.In Uttarakhand’s capital Dehradun, when the Pushkar Singh Dhami government moved to rename the Miyanwala locality as Ramjiwala, local residents, most of them Hindu, protested. The government had apparently taken Mianwala for a Muslim name. It is not. The name derives from a 17th-century Rajput title. The residents knew their history better than their politicans.But changing the name of a road or a building is different in kind from changing the name of an entire city— or a Union Territory with a population of over 30 million. Delhi’s identity is plural and layered, and its older names, Dhillika, Dehli, are well established in the historical record. The city was many things before the Mughals arrived, and many more things after.Many Urdu poets and writers appended “Dehlavi” or “Dilli” to their names as a mark of belonging—Daagh Dehlvi, Tabish Dehlvi, Gulzar Dehlvi, Sahir Dehlavi, Amir Khusrau Dehlavi, Bekhud Dehlavi. If the city’s name changes, what becomes of these pen names? And what of Allahabad High Court, which was not renamed when the city became Prayagraj? The institutional name remains, a reminder that renaming and reality do not always travel together.The Persian proverb “Hanuz Dilli Dur Ast”—“Delhi is still far away”—carries more than its literal meaning. It is attributed to the 14th-century Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, who is said to have spoken these words when the Sultan Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq vowed to punish him on his return from a military campaign. The Sultan died before reaching the city. The proverb lives on, and it may outlast the signage too.Justice Markandey Katju once acidly proposed that governments rename 30 Indian cities he characterised as carrying Mughal associations, but, he declared, “We Allahabadis will continue calling it Allahabad, come what may.”The Zimbabwean-British author Alexandra Fuller, writing about the African landscape in her memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, said that the land is indifferent to its name. “You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking. It doesn’t care.”Urdu poet Nida Fazli said it more gently: “Raston ke naam, waqt ke chehre badal gaye; ab kya batayen kisko kahan chhorh aaye hain”—the names of paths, the faces of time, have changed; what can we say now of who we left behind, and where.Do you think this renaming frenzy is meaningful? Or a charade that changes signboards while leaving everything else untouched?Until the next newsletter.Anand Mishra, Political Editor, FrontlineWe hope you have been enjoying our newsletters featuring a selection of articles that we believe will be of interest to a cross-section of our readers. Tell us if you like what you read. And also, what you don’t like! Mail us at frontline@thehindu.co.inCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS